Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched the final leg of his quest for the White House by visiting storm-battered Louisiana on Friday. He drove through a town that was flooded by Hurricane Isaac in part because it's still outside the vast flooding protection system built with federal funds after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Romney and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spent close to an hour meeting with first responders and local officials. Romney shook hands with National Guardsmen outside the U.S. Post Office and talked with a local resident, Jodie Chiarello, 42, who lost her home in Isaac's flooding.

Chiarello said she told Romney, "I lost everything" and that the presidential contender advised her on how to get assistance. "He said that he was going to do the best that he could for us," she said.
"He just told me to, um, there's assistance out there," Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. "He said, go home and call 211." That's a public service number offered in many states.

Chiarello said she will likely seek some other shelter because her home was submerged in the flooding. She expressed frustration about the town's lack of flood protection.

"We live outside the levee protection that's why we get all this water because they close the floodgates up front and all they're doing is flooding us out down here," she said. "It's very frustrating, very. We go through Katrina and Rita and now we're going through Cindy, Lee and now Isaac."

Oct. 27: Minnesota Moonlights as Swing State, but Ohio and Virginia Are More Crucial
By NATE SILVER
With the election so close, Saturday is no longer a day of rest for pollsters. Eight polls were released from potentially competitive states:

Via Time magazine's new poll out just now, the latest numbers out of Ohio show President Obama holding onto his lead there:

Counting both Ohioans who say they will head to the polls on November 6, and those who have already cast a ballot, Obama holds a 49% to 44% lead over Romney in a survey taken Monday and Tuesday night.

The pollís margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll makes clear that there are really two races underway in Ohio. On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger.

But Obama has clearly received a boost from Ohioís early voting period, which began on Oct. 2 and runs through November 5. Among respondents who say they have already voted, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Romney, 60% to 30%.

Alex and I wrote last week about Obama's durable lead in Ohio, and these numbers a week later are pretty consistent with what we've seen in the last couple of weeks there.

The FiveThirtyEight forecast model has found the past several days of battleground state polling to be reasonably strong for Barack Obama, with his chances of winning the Electoral College increasing as a result. The intuition behind this ought to be very simple: Mr. Obama is maintaining leads in the polls in Ohio and other states that are sufficient for him to win 270 electoral votes.

Friday featured a large volume of swing state polling, including three polls of Ohio, each of which showed Mr. Obama ahead by margins ranging from two to four percentage points.

Former "car czar" Steve Rattner is heading to Ohio tomorrow as a surrogate for President Obama, a source familiar with the trip said.
The source didn't immediately know the specifics of where in the state Rattner, who is now a frequent MSNBC commentator, will be and at which events.

But it underscores the emphasis the campaign is placing on the auto bailout.
Obama campaign aides did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
* This post has been updated

Ohio Is Not a Toss Up
Nate Silver looks at the polling average in Ohio -- made up of roughly a dozen polling firms who have surveyed the state over the past 10 days -- and notes it shows President Obama with a 2.4 percentage point lead over Mitt Romney.

"There are no precedents in the database for a candidate losing with a two- or three-point lead in a state when the polling volume was that rich... It is misinformed to refer to Ohio as a toss-up. Mr. Obama is the favorite there, and because of Ohio's central position in the Electoral College, he is therefore the overall favorite in the election."